Death, Birth, and Other Related Annoyances
by The Curmudgeon
Summary: "One of the stupidest ways to die has to be tripping on a dog." Arai Yuu has many annoyances, starting with her death and ending with mafiosi.
1. Anticlimaxes

_A/N: _Not really much to say here. Just, erm, hello. Please enjoy the story! If not, well, that's fine too.

_Disclaimer:_ I do not own Katekyo Hitman Reborn

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><p><em>Death, Birth, and Other Related Annoyances<em>

Annoyance One: _Anticlimaxes_

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><p>Five o'clock in the evening and the sky was already a deep indigo outside the large windows of a small hearth room. The only light came from a laptop perched on the scratched coffee table; its harsh white glow sent eerie shadows splaying over every surface, like the many, always present, creeping hands of old Death. On the mantelpiece, the faces of small figurines were manipulated into sneering expressions of distaste or haunting visages of pain.<p>

From my position against the archway that connected the hearth room to the entry way, I snorted. Talk about melodramatic. One hand firmly grasping a mug of eggnog, I reached the other along the pale wall and found the light switches.

Suddenly the small space was bathed in soft light, reveling it to be homey and pleasant. A towering Christmas tree in the far corner suddenly sparkled with many tiny bulbs of blue, green, red, yellow, and white. On the mantelpiece, the figurines were angels with their beautiful wise faces, elegant robes of varying shades of gold, and outspread downy wings. The furniture was slightly worn around the edges and eclectic in style, but the couches and chairs were soft as clouds and the wood tables were rich and dark in color.

"Much better," I said with a small smile.

I shuffled my way across the room, tugging my sweater tighter around me, and threw myself onto the big, plush red sofa. I set my mug on the coffee table and brought the glowing laptop closer to me. It was a few days before Christmas Eve and my parents were out with old friends. This meant I had the house to myself for a few hours.

A grin tugged at my face as a fluffy ball of warmth curled up at my feet. My dog, Penny, was always following me around and always had to lay herself in the most inconvenient of places. It was annoying when you ended up tripping over her, or nearly stepping on her because she'd situated herself in just the wrong place. Reaching my left hand down to ruffle her soft ginger fur, I used my right to skim across the slightly rough surface of the laptop trackpad. Within a second or two I found what I was looking for.

Namely, the fanfiction I'd been reading a few hours prior.

_'Yukishiro Rose's pouty pink rose-like lips curved into a secret smile and but the rest of her porcelain face show no emotion. She flicks her midnight coal black hair behind her toned slender shoulder. Her bright lilac violet orbs glittered dazzlingly in the sunlight of the bright spring morning. She is very intelligent and the top of her class._

_ "Oh sporks, I cant believe I'm going to school in Japan!" she giggled._

_ Rose straightened her 'Zombies Just Want Hugz' shirt and glided to her new school.'_

Having read this before, I massaged my already throbbing temple and skipped forward a few chapters. Why I always felt the need to subject myself to things that annoyed the ever-loving _piss_ out of me, I never quite knew. At very least this story wasn't on the level of _My Immortal_, but it lacked the entertaining author's notes and the amusing Freudian slips that made _My Immortal _that much closer to being bearable.

I took a few calming sips of my eggnog and reminded myself that I could always send a lengthy critique. A lengthy critique stuffed with obvious tips, and corrections, and passive-aggressiveness that would all most likely be ignored. My eyebrow twitched slightly. Damn it.

_'Rose smiled dazzlingly at the class._

_ "Hajimemashite, minna-san! Let's be friends!"_

_ Many of the boys feel their faces heat up. She's so cute!_

_All the girls feel their faces heat up. That whore!'_

An unladylike snort escaped me. Maybe the story was actually, in fact, a parody? Snickering, I remembered the series it was published under: Katekyo Hitman Reborn, an anime series about a sort of pseudo-mafia that uses magic. If it, the story, was a parody it would mean this Rose would probably receive an interesting end.

Most likely from being 'bitten to death', I hoped.

My happy imaginings were interrupted by a loud pounding on the door. I jumped up from my seat, intent to see what was the matter, and, well…

I tripped over my dog, broke my neck and died.

Most of the time in a situation like mine, the person dies dramatically. They die taking a bullet for someone they love, or get hit by a car and linger between life and death for hours, or get tragically ill and die surrounded by their friends and family. I, however, got a death that half the afterlife would laugh at if they could.

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><p>After I died, I found myself in a place that was definitely not my hearth room. It was white and expansive and seemed to go on forever. The ground didn't even feel like it existed, instead it was like you were standing on a thin film of mist that was your only barrier from falling into a deep abyss of white. You had no idea where you were and, more importantly, you just didn't care. Your mind would cloud over, filled with fog whispering to you '<em>It's going to be all right'<em> and '_Don't be afraid'_, convincing you these foreign thoughts were actually your own.

So you would listen to the calming words, and just stare forward into the endless white, waiting.

What seemed like a few hours in, it slowly dawned upon me that I was viewing things with my head tilted to the side. Blinking in confusion, I attempted to coerce my neck muscles into guiding my head into an upright position.

"…"

"…"

"…"

Nothing happened.

Again, harder this time…

"…"

"…"

"…"

Nothing.

With a huff, I used my hands to set my head right. At that point I realized there were other people around me, though rather far off, staring mindlessly into the same blank stretch of space I had been. Weird.

I smiled vaguely and continued my staring.

What seemed like days pass before I realize that a few of those people in the distance were gravely injured. One man, I saw his burnt guts threatening to spill through his splayed fingers onto the nonexistent ground. A little girl's skull had a rather disturbing dent in it. Others were just very old or looked as though they were very, very ill.

Something in the back of my mind told me this was all wrong in some way, but it couldn't quite put a finger on exactly why. So, when a bright light bathed over the area, effectively blinding me and propelling me forward in some odd direction, I didn't question it.

This was regrettable.

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><p>Sometime later, in some far off parallel universe, Arai Shinju gave birth to a baby girl at Nanimori Hospital. Shinju and her husband, Nobu, decided to name their little bundle of joy Yuu.<p>

The only strange thing about their child was that, when she was born, she didn't cry; she _screamed_.

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><p><em>AN:_ So there you go, erm... Welp! Please, do feel free to review if you want! I really enjoy them, even if they're only to tell me how awful I am at _all the things_.


	2. Childhood

_Annoyance Two:_ Childhood

As a general rule, being birthed is confusing and mentally scarring as all get out. You're covered in what is, ineloquently put, uterus slime, are stark naked, and are surrounded by these giant, loud blobs of color that don't even try to block out the blinding fluorescent lights above. Then one of the blobs grabs you by the ankle, hangs you upside down, and spanks you so quickly that you can only think, "Woah there, buddy! At least buy me a drink first!"

Most people are lucky enough not to remember this. However, it's been established that Lady Luck just loves to sit back and laugh at the sheer absurdity of the things that happen to me; I could remember my birth and, sadly, knew that I had been through this all before. I had the mind of a teenager in the body of a newborn with no idea how in seven hells I'd ended up that way.

Let's just pause for a moment to thoughtfully consider how completely_ terrifying_ that whole concept is.

I mean, not only would I have to go through puberty again, but I would have to deal with not being able to manage solid foods or wipe my own ass for a long time. To say my pride was about to take some serious hits would have been an understatement.

The bright side to the situation would have to have been that my parents didn't turn out to be some clichéd evil, abusive couple that blamed me for their marital problems or beat me because I was so very _tragically beautiful _and they were just _jealous_. Arai Nobu and Shinju were an odd match, but tended to be the typical doting, but anxious and confused, first time parents that one would expect.

Nobu stood at an even six feet with a comically gangly frame, often stumbling over himself as if he had the body of a drunken baby giraffe. His rectangular glasses constantly slipped down his ridiculously pointy nose, eliciting strange squeaking noises from the man whenever they came close to smashing on the floor. Nobu worked in the noble profession of accounting which was, according to him, serious business. He also, I observed, loved to read the celebrity gossip magazines that somehow magically made their way onto the small wooden table next to his favorite chair.

Shinju, his wife, was a broad shouldered, wide hipped woman who towered a full five inches above her husband. She had large amounts of fiery, bushy hair that she kept out of her face with a headband or hair-tie. The red-head was a cheerful woman who had the unfortunate habit of nearly suffocating people between her rather large breasts. Shinju, though her cooking left much to be desired, had an impressive talent for baked goods and other confectionaries.

Often during the first few years of my life the couple would drag me to the hospital and various clinics with worried expressions. They would badger the doctors as to why I never seemed to cry, or, when the time came, why I hadn't started trying to speak my first words yet. No matter what tests the doctors ran, the conclusion was the same; I was a perfectly normal and healthy baby.

My parents would protest, and I would only sit there and let out a despaired little gurgle.

Honestly, I couldn't find it in me to summon tears every time that I needed something. And despite the fact that my little baby brain that somehow managed to contain a nicely sized teenage brain was somehow picking up Japanese, the apparent dominant language of my new home, like a dry sponge picks up spilt water there was one simple fact; I really, really did not want to deal with hearing my words formed by a voice that was technically mine, but most definitely not mine.

I could deal with looking in the mirror and seeing a different face; you rarely had to look at your own face. Your voice, however, is always there. You hear it constantly, whether it be in your head whispering your thoughts, or out loud screaming to the world.

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><p>We all sat in the kitchen, one warm Sunday afternoon, my family and I. Shinju was trying her hand at a thick stew and, judging by the dark smoke billowing through the air, was not doing so well. Nobu sat in one of the low, wooden chairs that circled the equally wooden kitchen table, one of his legs bouncing up and down in a steady rhythm, and several stacks of paper detailing boring calculations were laid out in front of him. At the other side of the table, I was contained in one of the most diabolical and torturous inventions since the rack or the iron maiden.<p>

Namely, the highchair.

_Clank. Clank._

Wiggling side to side as forcefully as possible, I tried to escape from my prison, but to no avail.

_Clank. Clank._

"Today I went to go look at that space in the shopping district," Shinju piped up, a smile in her words. "It's pretty cheap, considering all that we have saved up, and the renovations wouldn't cost too much."

_Clank. Clank._

Nobu glanced up and replied, "It'll take a while for us to start making money off of it, though, maybe even a few years."

_Clank. Clank._

"Are you doubting my skills as a business woman?" she huffed in response, pivoting away from her charcoal stew to stare down her husband.

_Clank. Clank._

"No," he answered with a sigh. "I just think that-."

_Clank. Clank. Clank…?_

"Shit!" I swore loudly as my highchair began to tip too far to the right. Moving my body as best I could to the left, I tried to counteract the suddenly out of control tilt as best as possible.

_CLANK._

A relieved sigh escaped my mouth as the chair fell back into its upright position. A silence descended over the room, thick and heavy, only to be broken by the sizzling of the now boiling over pot as the couple stared at me. Both of them had similar expressions of slack-jawed shock on their faces, their mouths hanging open so much I wondered vaguely how many flies they could catch.

Suddenly, Shinju's face split into an anatomy-defying grin and she rushed over to me, completely disregarding the damage being done to the stovetop.

"My baby can speak!" she exclaimed as she scooped me up and hugged me so hard I thought my back would break.

Nobu managed to scoop his jaw up off the floor. "Um, dear," he said, "where did she learn that word?"

"The television, I don't know," Shinju waved off his concern. "Our baby can speak, she'll learn other words soon enough!"

I couldn't help but smile a bit at the woman's enthusiasm, but I was rather annoyed that my first word in this new life ended up being 'shit'.

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><p>"Mom, where are we going?" I asked one day as my mother and I made our way through the quiet streets of Namimori.<p>

She smiled. "We're going to go see my friend. She works at a kindergarten, isn't that fun?"

I gave a sort of noncommittal shrug and began hopping down the pristine sidewalk on my left foot. Three years had passed since being born again, and one thing had become very clear over the course of various disastrous play dates; other children and I did not get on. It may have been because I tended to be a gigantic curmudgeon half of the time or it may have been because of some magical property in young kids that allowed them to realize that there was something not quite right with me.

I would never forget the Spiderman incident. Never.

"Oh, come on Yuu-chan, it'll only be five minutes tops," Shinju basically whined. "You'll be starting school in a few years, and you won't be able to do all this sitting in the lonely corner stuff then."

My cheeks puffed out until I looked like a strange, pink chipmunk, and I gave a curt nod. Shinju scooped me up in her arms with her signature anatomy-defying grin and marched the rest of the way to the squat, beige building that served as the local kindergarten. The façade was generically boring, flat and blocky; through the tinted windows you could barely make out the outlines of the various pieces of cut-up paper that had been stuck to the inside surface.

The inside of the building was brighter; the classroom we entered was painted with bright, primary colors. Low blue tables were crowded in front of the crayon drawing covered teacher's desk, their little yellow chairs placed around them in some sort of helter-skelter sense of order. Red shelves of thin, cardboard books, and large, fairly impossible to swallow toys lined the walls, except for the wall next to the door, which was devoted to a odd sort of wooden loft that the kids were meant to play in if the floor space became too crowded. The class sat on a little carpet of blocked colors in what could only be described as the 'story corner'.

When we entered the room, the teacher set her book to the side and swept up from her perch on one those tiny yellow chairs. Her paisley skirt trailing on the ground as she strode over, she announced to the children,

"Everyone, playtime while I talk to this nice lady, okay?"

When she smiled her front teeth were far too big and I was reminded vaguely of a rabbit.

"Yuu-chan," my mother said, catching my attention again. "Could you play with the other kids while we talk?"

I nodded, and they swept over to the teacher's desk on the other side of the large room, talking animatedly. For a moment I stood in the doorway, shifting my weight from foot to foot and observing the older, yet much younger, children playing. On the carpet some boys had hauled out a big plastic bin of unwieldy wooden blocks and were making towers as tall as themselves, only to knock them down. At the tables, kids were drawing and playing with Play-Doh. Others were just running around the room, giggling.

No one was on the loft that I could see, so I decided that I would climb up onto the high perch and laze around for a while. The rungs of the ladder were a bit too far apart for my scrawny limbs, but I somehow managed to slowly pull myself up them. Only one and a half meters off of the ground, the climb to the loft was not that daunting.

What was a bit daunting was what I saw when I managed to reach the top. Namely, a five year old with a mop of black hair, and blue eyes like steel, that sat in the middle of the loft surrounded by little cardboard dinosaur books that more than likely had references to Darwinist ideas and the weakness of herbivorous animals.

He'd also somehow managed to find some long wooden blocks to serve as makeshift weapons.

'Fuck my life,' I thought when he stood up and began making his way over to the ladder where I was still only half dispatched onto the plush surface of the loft.

He stuck his foot in my face and tried to push me down towards the ground with it. It would have been kind of funny if it weren't for the fact that I had a foot on my face and some sociopathic toddler trying to make me a bloody splatter on the carpeted floor.

"Down," the boy ordered. He pushed my face again, harder this time.

"No," I replied shortly.

"Down," he ordered again, frowning.

"No."

The boy's eye twitched and he kicked me in the face. I didn't budge, but the inside of my mouth filled with metallic flavor and I was sure I'd bit the inside of my cheek.

Oh, it was _on_.

With a cry, I lunged at the boy. His eyes widened a fraction, obviously not used to other kids challenging him, and he swung one of the wooden blocks at me. It collided with my shoulder and sent an electric shock of pain through my body. The other block hit the opposite side of my body a second later, but I continued my advance to try and claw this brat's eyes out.

The spat lasted for a full three minutes before the rabbit teacher's shrill voice cried out, "Oh my- what are you two _doing_?" We were both hauled off of the loft, me still kicking; the boy was completely impassive if it were not for the almost imperceptible pout that adorned his face. My frock was torn and had small spots of blood on it, and I could feel an expansive network of bruises forming on my body.

However, it was all worth it when I saw a dark splotch of purple blooming on the boy's cheek.

"Shinju, I'm so sorry, I didn't think that Kyoya-kun would…" the teacher fretted, holding dark haired boy by his shoulders. The boy, Kyoya, glared up at her.

My mother shook her head, laughing. "It's fine, it's fine. I shouldn't have let Yuu-chan alone. You've told me about the boy before, so I should have remembered."

Later, she would stomp around the living room, ranting about how if she'd known who Kyoya's parents were she would have given them a piece of her mind and a fist to the face.

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><p><em>AN_: There ends chapter two. Haha, wow, how long has it been? Two months? At least I haven't built up a readership or anything yet.

Thanks to those who read and reviewed the previous chapter! Please feel free to leave your thoughts and feelings on this chapter in a review, especially constructive critiques, but even short reviews are appreciated too.

Next chapter will be some more growing up. By chapter four we should start hitting the plot.


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